Various edge connectors of this type have been proposed and commercially available but are insufficient as an edge connector to accommodate various circuit boards (PCBs) of different board thickness. That is, resiliently deformable contacts in a connector to receive an edge of a PCB for making electrical connection are limited in the degree of deformation and cannot accommodate PCBs of two largely different thicknesses.
Additionally, PCBs can warp, which makes it more difficult for currently available connectors to accommodate them.
There is a low insertion force connector as one example of this type of edge connector disclosed in, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,737,120 in which a PCB is gripped between two opposite contact sections. However, one of said contact sections has essentially no room to deform and the other contact section is in a cantilever configuration with limited amount of deformation and tends to be permanently deformed at the base portion which is very close to its contact portion.
Also, disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,848,952 is a zero insertion force edge connector having a C-shaped cantilever type contact disposed against a part of a PCB to distribute the contact stress. However, such connector is poor in dimensional accuracy because of the use of a part of the housing to cooperate with the PCB.
As for PCB standards, there are for example two standards, one is the U.S. standard with board thickness of 1.27 .sub.-0.08.sup.+0.1 mm and the other is the Japanese standard with board thickness of 1.2 .sub.-0.12.sup.+0.15 mm. There requires tolerance of about 0.3 mm to accommodate both standards and no edge connector having such tolerance can be met by the connector designs of the above U.S. patents.
The present invention intends to overcome the disadvantages of such conventional edge connector. It is, therefore, an object of the present invention to provide a highly accurate edge connector to accommodate PCBs with larger tolerances by distributing the stress to accept larger deformation and by not cooperating with a part of the housing by the contact.